Tessa Linton sat at the counter, her head in her hands. Pete Wayne sat opposite her, staring blindly out the window. Except for the day the space shuttle Challenger had exploded, this was the first time Jeffrey had ever seen him not wearing his paper hat inside the diner. Still, Pete’s hair was bunched up into a point at the top, making his face look longer than it already was.
“Tess?” Jeffrey asked, putting his hand on her shoulder. She leaned into him, crying. Jeffrey smoothed her hair, giving Pete a nod.
Pete Wayne was normally a cheerful man, but his expression today was one of absolute shock. He barely acknowledged Jeffrey, continuing to stare out the windows lining the front of the restaurant, his lips moving slightly, no sound coming out.
A few moments of silence passed, then Tessa sat up. She fumbled with the napkin dispenser until Jeffrey offered his handkerchief. He waited until she had blown her nose to ask, “Where’s Sara?”
Tessa folded the handkerchief. “She’s still in the bathroom. I don’t know—” Tessa’s voice caught. “There was so much blood. She wouldn’t let me go in.”
He nodded, stroking her hair back off her face. Sara was very protective of her little sister, and this instinct had transferred to Jeffrey during their marriage. Even after the divorce, Jeffrey still felt in some way that Tessa and the Lintons were his family.
“You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. “Go ahead. She needs you.”
Jeffrey tried not to react to this. If not for the fact that Sara was the county coroner, he would never see her. It said a lot about their relationship that somebody had to die in order for her to be in the same room with him.
Walking to the back of the diner, Jeffrey felt a sense of dread overcome him. He knew that something violent had happened. He knew that Sibyl Adams had been killed. Other than that, he had no idea what to expect when he tugged opened the door to the women’s bathroom. What he saw literally took his breath away.
Sara sat in the middle of the room, Sibyl Adams’s head in her lap. Blood was everywhere, covering the body, covering Sara, whose shirt and pants were soaked down the front, as if someone had taken a hose and sprayed her. Bloody shoe and hand prints marked the floor as if a great struggle had occurred.
Jeffrey stood in the doorway, taking all this in, trying to catch his breath.
“Shut the door,” Sara whispered, her hand resting on Sibyl’s forehead.
He did as he was told, walking around the periphery of the room. His mouth opened, but nothing would come out. There were the obvious questions to ask, but part of Jeffrey did not want to know the answers. Part of him wanted to take Sara out of this room, put her in his car, and drive until neither one of them could remember the way this tiny bathroom looked and smelled. There was the taste of violence in the air, morbid and sticky in the back of his throat. He felt dirty just standing there.
“She looks like Lena,” he finally said, referring to Sibyl Adams’s twin sister, a detective on his force. “For just a second I thought…” He shook his head, unable to continue.
“Lena’s hair is longer.”
“Yeah,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the victim. Jeffrey had seen a lot of horrible things in his time, but he had never personally known a victim of violent crime. Not that he knew Sibyl Adams well, but in a town as small as Heartsdale, everyone was your neighbor.
Sara cleared her throat. “Did you tell Lena yet?”
Her question fell on him like an anvil. Two weeks into his job as police chief, he had hired Lena Adams out of the academy in Macon. Those early years, she was like Jeffrey, an outsider. Eight years later he had promoted her to detective. At thirty-three, she was the youngest detective and only woman on the senior squad. And now her sister had been murdered in their own backyard, little more than two hundred yards from the police station. He felt a sense of personal responsibility that was almost suffocating.
“Jeffrey?”
Jeffrey took a deep breath, letting it go slowly. “She’s taking some evidence to Macon,” he finally answered. “I called the highway patrol and asked them to bring her back here.”
Sara was looking at him. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but she hadn’t been crying. Jeffrey was glad of this one thing, because he had never seen Sara cry. He thought if he saw her crying that something in him would give.
“Did you know she was blind?” she asked.
Jeffrey leaned against the wall. He had somehow forgotten that detail.
“She didn’t even see it coming,” Sara whispered. She bent her head down, looking at Sibyl. As usual, Jeffrey couldn’t imagine what Sara was thinking. He decided to wait for her to talk. Obviously, she needed a few moments to collect her thoughts.
He tucked his hands into his pockets, taking in the space. There were two stalls with wooden doors across from a sink that was so old the fixtures for hot and cold were on opposite sides of the basin. Over this was a gold speckled mirror that was worn through at the edges. All told, the room was not more than twenty feet square, but the tiny black and white tiles on the floor made it seem even smaller. The dark blood pooling around the body didn’t help matters. Claustrophobia had never been a problem for Jeffrey, but Sara’s silence was like a fourth presence in the room. He looked up at the white ceiling, trying to get some distance.
Finally Sara spoke. Her voice was stronger, more confident. “She was on the toilet when I found her.”
For lack of anything better to do, Jeffrey took out a small spiral-bound notebook. He grabbed a pen from his breast pocket and started to write as Sara narrated the events that had led up to this moment. Her voice became monotone as she described Sibyl’s death in clinical detail.
“Then I asked Tess to bring my cell phone.” Sara stopped speaking, and Jeffrey answered her question before she could get it out.
“She’s okay,” he provided. “I called Eddie on the way here.”
“Did you tell him what happened?”
Jeffrey tried to smile. Sara’s father was not one of his biggest fans. “I was lucky he didn’t hang up on me.”
Sara did not so much as smile, but her eyes finally met Jeffrey’s. There was a softness there that he had not seen in ages. “I need to do the prelim, then we can take her to the morgue.”
Jeffrey tucked the pad into his coat pocket as Sara gently slid Sibyl’s head to the floor. She sat back on her heels, wiping her hands on the back of her pants.
She said, “I want to have her cleaned up before Lena sees her.”
Jeffrey nodded. “She’s at least two hours away. That should give us time to process the scene.” He indicated the stall door. The lock was busted off. “Was the lock that way when you found her?”
“The lock’s been that way since I was seven,” Sara said, pointing to her briefcase beside the door. “Hand me a pair of gloves.”
Jeffrey opened the case, trying not to touch the blood on the handles. He pulled out a pair of latex gloves from an inside pocket. When he turned around, Sara was standing at the foot of the body. Her expression had changed, and despite the blood staining the front of her clothes, she seemed to be back in control.
Still, he had to ask, “Are you sure you want to do this? We can call somebody from Atlanta.”
Sara shook her head as she slipped on the gloves with practiced efficiency. “I don’t want a stranger touching her.”